At Ease with the Dead by Walter Satterthwait Page A

“Ah, Lisa. Just in time. I was beginning to get silly.”
    â€œNot you, Granny,” said Lisa Wright. “Never silly.” She set a silver tray on the roll-top desk and lifted from it a small glass of sherry and a cup and saucer. She handed the glass to her grandmother, the cup and saucer to me. We both thanked her. She returned to the desk, slid out the swivel chair and turned it around, took the other glass of sherry from the tray and then sat down, facing us. With her right forefinger she brushed a strand of hair away from her left eye. She smiled at me. I smiled back. I was beginning to wish I were ten years younger.
    Alice Wright, back now in a world of sherry and afternoon tea, said, “So, Mr. Croft. You told Lisa you wanted to learn something about my father. What exactly did you mean?”
    Once again I related the story that Daniel Begay had told me. From time to time I sipped at my tea, from time to time the two of them sipped at their sherry.
    â€œThese dreams the woman is having,” said Alice Wright when I finished. “Do they contain any details that might indicate where the remains are located?”
    She had asked the question with perfect seriousness. Maybe she’d learned a thing or two from the Jivaro. I told her what Daniel Begay had said about the smell of flowers.
    She nodded as though she were filing it mentally away.
    I said, “Do you remember, Dr. Wright, your father bringing back the remains?”
    â€œPlease,” she said. “Doctors are people who play with tonsils. My name is Alice. And yes, of course I remember. He brought them back for me. The body of this man—Ganado, you said? It was my birthday present. I had just turned eleven.”
    I sipped at my tea. “I see.” I didn’t, of course. The guy couldn’t afford a pair of roller skates? A bicycle?
    Alice smiled. “My father was an unusual man, Joshua. Do you mind if I call you Joshua?”
    â€œPlease do.”
    Another smile. “An unusual man, as I say. He encouraged me in whatever I did, in whatever I was interested. That summer, before he left for Arizona, I was interested in archaeology.”
    I nodded. “So he brought you back a body.”
    She cocked her head, smiling. “It really was rather a dreadful thing to do, wasn’t it? Not from my perspective, not at the time, because naturally I was delighted. Absolutely thrilled. But from the Navajo perspective. In their eyes, of course, what he did was grave robbing.”
    She sipped at her sherry. “You have to understand something, Joshua, by way of explanation. Not excuse, but explanation. Back then, even to most professional archaeologists, the remains they disinterred were simply puzzle pieces, with no more moral or spiritual content than the nuts and bolts of an Erector Set. If you backed one of these chaps into a corner, pointed out that the bones had once been a human being, he’d likely get very huffy and start prattling about Knowledge and The Search for Truth. You can’t make an omelette, he might tell you, without breaking eggs. Well, then make something else, you might say, and quite reasonably, too. But the acquisition of knowledge is invariably a destructive process. The question is, finally, what value do we assign to the knowledge acquired, and what value to the thing destroyed?”
    She looked at me as though she actually expected me to provide an answer.
    â€œBeats me,” I said.
    She laughed again. “And beats me, too. But the question itself would never have occurred to my father, for all his many merits. To him, it was self-evident that if the remains of this Indian furthered knowledge in general, and his daughter’s in particular, then let’s by all means cart it off to El Paso.”
    She smiled. “To be fair to the man, he didn’t really plan to keep the remains. He wanted me to see them, and to understand how he’d found them. He